Cruising Speed
Page 3
The clips continue to pour in on Jimmy’s election. Newsweek prepared a cover story on Jim, electing at the last moment to devote it to Senator Muskie. But the research was done, and I see now that the San Antonio Light has run a piece by Tom Mathews and Jacquin Sanders, sent out by “Newsweek Feature Service” (of which I hadn’t heard), on the family. The day after the election, Tom Mathews rode with me from National Review to Syosset, Long Island, where I had to give a speech, and now I see a part of what I told him coming in through the clip. The theme of the cover story, Mathews had told me in some embarrassment, was to be the similarity between the Kennedys and the Buckleys, a so-what point that people have been making for a long time, giving way to the reticulative passions that seem to me to rule not only journalism, but sociology and even psychology. The story quotes me directly: “ ‘We do have similarities to the Kennedys,’ says Bill. ‘Our wealth, our fecundity, our Catholicism. Other than that, the comparison is engaging but misleading. The Kennedys had an Irish cultural upbringing. I didn’t know where Ireland was until I graduated from Yale.’ The truth is,” the story goes on, “the Buckleys are not the Irish-Catholics they are thought to be. On the maternal side, the heritage is Southern with Robert E. Lee in the background. And their paternal great-grandfather, who emigrated from Ireland, was an Irish Protestant who converted when he married.”
Why are so many Irish defensive? How can anybody be patronizing about Ireland, in the century when Ireland gave us Shaw and Joyce and Yeats, while England was defending herself primarily through American expatriates James and Eliot? But to go around posing as an “Irish-American” ought to suggest something. What? In our youth we were much more heavily influenced by Mexico, where Father lived for twenty years before being expelled, than by Ireland, which he visited for the first time in 1939 because he wanted to see the horse show at Dublin. The five youngest of us spoke Spanish before we learned English (and in between, three of us spoke French). The eldest five went from French to Spanish to English. A dull point, I always thought, the Kennedy-Buckley business, but there will probably be no end of it. ... A priest writes to tell me that he would be glad to give me a list of people to see in Chile. I had mentioned in my column that I would be traveling there, making the point that not to do so in the next period is rather like giving up a retrospective opportunity to visit Havana in January of 1959. He concludes, “If you make this trip to Chile, I would like you to meet the Chile I know, and not the Chile that you could be introduced to by the American Embassy. There is a world of difference!” The last sentence suggests that the priest meant to write: “. .. and not the Chile that you would be introduced to by the American Embassy.” Why the difference, I wonder. Oh, I mean why the difference other than the obvious difference, that ambassadors and priests don’t meet the identical set of people? Is it the suggestion that ambassadors as a genre don’t know what is really happening in Chile? Or that this particular ambassador doesn’t know? I doubt the latter, because Ed Korry is bright and industrious, a very good friend and former colleague of my sister Priscilla, the managing editor of National Review. She used to work for United Press, under Ed in both New York and Paris. Ed is a most resolute liberal, who used to tease and be teased by members of the family while weekending in Sharon, which he often did. I spoke to him over the telephone last week while he was in Washington to discuss the crisis. I am to stay with him at the residence, he insisted, but probably I should have an official address at a downtown hotel—he will arrange it all. ... I must decide, at some point, whether to charge my airline ticket to the USIA, or pay for it myself. The members of the Commission are instructed by Congress and the President to travel, to survey our operations all over the world, and to report back our findings. Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson’s successor, reported in his column a few months ago that the USIA had paid about $5,500 in airplane bills for me in the year or so since I was appointed by Nixon, even though I wrote professionally from everywhere I went. How evil that sounds, or is made to sound! I keep reminding myself that as long as I think I am doing the right thing, I mustn’t let Drew Pearson-types intimidate me. If I had been Tom Dodd, I’d have organized, in response to Drew Pearson, the biggest possible testimonial dinner in my own behalf, $100 a plate, the proceeds going directly to me, as an unrestricted gift, the whole of it printed plainly on the ticket. Drew Pearson-types flourish from the special difficulty of communicating certain kinds of truths, for instance that the incremental trip across the Atlantic Ocean, say to attend a meeting of Public Affairs Officers in Vienna, isn’t fun. It is work. If you spend half your life on airplanes anyway, the extra plane ride somebody else pays for isn’t a treat. But you can’t say that, because you will sound either blase, and spoiled; or disingenuous. And sitting all day, listening to eight hours of reports on the Voice of America, cultural exchange programs, magazine distribution problems, library attendance records isn’t fun. It may be and often is interesting, like seminars on the Common Market. But it isn’t fun-, it is duty, and in the case of the Commission, unpaid duty. But already Anderson has won a victory, because here I am dwelling on the point...
Gene Tunney has called me twice, and I had better drop him a note, since, on trying to return his call, I find he is out of the office. The last time he called he was wondering what exactly was the meaning of the legend on Yeats’s tombstone, “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!” I didn’t have the least idea, but that very evening I was on my boat with Hugh Kenner and I asked him. He said, with that precision I find utterly endearing, that by coincidence I had asked the question of one of the half-dozen people in the world (T. S. Eliot called Hugh the finest critic of his generation) who happen to know. I’d have been a little apprehensive if Gene’s call had come in a month ago, because (of course) National Review supported George Murphy against his son John; and Gene has been a very old friend and supporter of NR ... I write a letter commending a young man who used to sail with us—for a position in a major hospital; a young man of striking intelligence and affability, who went on to graduate first in his class at medical school. How do admissions types, whether of universities or hospitals or yacht clubs, manage to evaluate these letters? Do they develop a kind of Braille, by which they can tell if you are being effusive because you mean to be effusive; or that you are being effusive because diplomacy requires that you be effusive? My device is to say what I have to say, and then invite the addressee to telephone me to probe for further details, intending thereby to register the seriousness of my endorsement. I remember in 1966 receiving a request for a seconding letter from the sponsor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. for membership in the New York Yacht Club, my only personal experience with Mr. Roosevelt having been that he was on Firing Line a few weeks earlier, shortly after running for governor of New York, and getting fewer votes than the Conservative candidate, Paul Adams—the historic moment that gave the Conservatives the Third Position on the ballot. I was surprised on that count— that I knew him only so briefly; and on the larger count, my assumption having been that the New York Yacht Club was surely invented, a hundred or two hundred years ago, by an antecedent of FDR Jr., and I would have thought that my own inclinations on the matter of his proposed membership would have been a) supererogatory; or b) ideologically suspect. I settled the dilemma by advising the Membership Committee that my own feeling was that Mr. Roosevelt ought to be admitted ex officio to any organization that his father had neglected to nationalize. No letter of thanks, or acknowledgment, though I had concluded by saying the truth, which is that even after introducing Mr. Roosevelt on the television program as a man who has “specialized in being a has-been,” I had nonetheless found him greatly charming and courteous, which may have been hard for him under the circumstances... A friend writes me, “Mario Procaccino has had to take a little flack from Democratic colleagues who contrast the publicized thanks he received at Rockefeller HQs with the unpublicized thanks he received from the conservatives.” I pass along the note to Dan Mahoney, the c
hairman of the Conservative Party, National Review’s lawyer, and my friend ... A young girl, a close follower of Firing Line (she is a secretary, but she has not missed one of the last one hundred screenings done in New York—how she arrived at such an arrangement with her employer I do not know, and shall not ask), tells me that she has reason to believe that a prominent CBS television commentator, whom I came to know slightly during the mayoralty campaign, is lonely following a personal tragedy, so I write to him and suggest we lunch . . . Dick Clurman of Time sends in the headline on the suicide of Mishima and suggests that here is a Conservative who knows how to make his points with style. That reminds me, and I send off a note to Gerhart Niemeyer, whose Letter from Tokyo in the current issue of National Review, which at the last moment we had to go over to put references to Mishima in the past tense, is superb; everything about Gerhart is superb, a judgment in which his students appear to agree. I have to leave for the office.
I stop by at Dr. Poster’s on the way to the editorial conference, for a routine fitting of my contact lenses, with which I have been playing for 18 months because that long ago, coincident with my failing eyesight, my friend Renira Horne told me about the pleasures of contact lenses—you put them on in the morning, take them off at night, and in between it is as though your eyes had never deteriorated. Then Ronald Reagan encouraged me, telling me that he has to remind himself to take his off at night. Dr. Poster is the Number 5 doctor I have consulted on the matter, my experiences in between having served primarily to amuse my wife, who urges me to give them up, as snares and delusions, even as she knows that such taunts harden the determination, although I guess I should acknowledge the distinction between “the determination” and “my determination,” there being a distinction. Dr. Poster is the chairman of the contact lens section of his profession, and he is the most sublimely confident practitioner in the world, who, when I asked him, informed me that he disqualifies about 10 per cent of those who approach him for lenses, upon discovering among other things a hypersensitivity or whatever to foreign bodies introduced onto the eye, and that of those he proceeds to deal with, he fails in only about 10 per cent of the cases. He is a very patient man, who expects me to show up week after week (this is my fifth or sixth visit) on the joint understanding that the experiment is a failure unless I can dispense altogether with the eyeglasses I began to need only a few years ago. I tell him, today, that I am greatly discouraged by the Reader’s Digest article Aggie showed me, written by experts in the business who say that seven hours is the most you can hope to wear the lenses at one time. Dr. Poster smiles, puffs at his cigarette (he is trying to cut down because he has been the principal chain smoker in America for many years), and tells me that that is nonsense. Removing the lenses reminds me of the humiliations of my apprenticeship. It was Vienna, and I was locked in with the USIA, when my lenses began to itch uncontrollably. I endeavored to remove them unobserved, while Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II was briefing the twenty of us. Soon I became aware that I was being noticed, and that it wouldn’t be long before the USIA officials concluded that I suffered from an uncontrollable facial disorder. I walked quietly out, came upon a large Marine security guard, begged his pardon, handed him a rubber plunger, and asked him to please extract the lens from my eye; which he proceeded deftly to do, having laid aside his machine gun. There were other such experiences, but I have become a fanatic, and am always telling my skeptical friends that in Japan children are automatically fitted with contact lenses, in preference to eyeglasses—or so I am told—the advantages being obvious. As an evangelist, I suffer only from my failure to have been fitted with a set that I can, at this point, happily put on early in the morning, and remove late at night. I shall one day, under the burden of the taunts of my skeptical wife, especially cherish the sweetness of the chime, when I turn off the bedside light, “Ducky, did you remember to take out your lenses?” Dr. Poster, who does his own adjustments on the spot, makes a tiny adaptation, and sends me off happily confident that this will prove to be the marginal adaption; which it isn’t.
James Burnham comes in from Kent, Connecticut, on the eleven o’clock Tuesday train, which is why we do not hold our editorial meeting until eleven-thirty, or soon thereafter. There are eight or nine of us, seated around the table. Burnham is senior, a founding editor of the magazine, revered from the beginning by all of us, not only because of the legend—at 25 he was a full professor of philosophy at NYU; he stopped people dead with his Managerial Revolution early in the forties—but because of his quiet professionalism. He wrote the first piece on jazz for Partisan Review, and would write tomorrow on the common roots between phrenology and astrology, and the editorial transaction would be as simple as my saying, Jim, would you handle that, say, a No. S? A No. 3 means a short editorial, a No. 1 being the longest.
Bill Rusher always speaks first, because as publisher he goes back to other business after making his recommendations. He is the showman—who, as he ticks off his list, writes the appropriate commentary on each item with the tone of his voice, and takes special pleasure from reading aloud choice news items or speeches or releases from his most particular enemies, liberal Republicans. His timing is so good that his final sentence usually ends as he reaches the door of the conference room, which he opens with a flourish, his departure the signal for monotony to begin.
Jeffrey Hart comes down from Dartmouth, where he teaches eighteenth century English, history and poetry; writes a syndicated column; and produces a couple of books per year.
Priscilla, who as managing editor (I summoned her years ago from her post at UPI in Paris to help her younger brother) coordinates everything, reads—as will everyone around the table—from a list of items she thinks need editorial treatment, and you can see the writers run lines through the items that she has anticipated.
We go around the table. The tradition that points of view should not be explicated at the conference is apparently overwhelming, so much so that recently a very young assistant editor approached my sister Pitts after a meeting, telling her that he had been assigned, simply, “Burma.” “What is our point of view on Burma?” he asked. I am fascinated by how the editorial conference determines the lay of the editorial emphasis. What-is-our-position-on-Burma very seldom happens, because the position on Burma seems somehow to spring naturally out of the loins of the magazine. A position arrived at in this way must be distinguished from the decision-making process of, say, the editors of the Daily World, whose line is easily developed by merely plopping the question into layaway chemicals. NR’s is a quite unusual process, particularly in the light of the disparate emphases of its principal spirits. Frank Meyer, although he is never present—he lives reclusively in Woodstock, New York, as columnist and book review editor—is the relentless libertarian and global anti-Communist. Jeffrey is the flypaper who picks up the lint of any cultural development, anywhere, and it is never so amorphous, when he sits down to write about it, that it cannot fuel his heavy-duty engines. Priscilla has her eye out for the piquancies, and for the sentimental attachments of National Review. (“The trouble with conservatives,” Robert Strausz-Hupe once said, “is they do not retrieve their wounded”.) Chris Simonds, our Woodstock Nation, alternates between Understanding, and Anathematizing, and John Coyne is our California kid-watcher. He is very pleased this morning because a half hour ago he got a phone call from Spiro Agnew who told him that he, Agnew, had read The Kumquat Statement—Coyne’s account of what happened at Berkeley, and what has happened generally at the hands of the kids—and thinks it splendid, which greatly pleases John, whose first book it is, and who is smarting from reviews which contrast it unfavorably with Jim Kunen’s Strawberry Statement, whose counterpart Kumquat admittedly is. John’s account of the phone call is rendered as Buster Keaton would have done it, dry-face, slightly cynical, but clearly pleased; and we tingle with the thought that there is probably not another editorial office in New York City that would appreciate a congratulatory telephone call from Spiro Agnew.